Kmlwx

Maine almost looks like a solid bet on the latest GFS  

Wish I had been wrong but thanks everyone and especially to @RodneyS for putting on the contest! Let's hope we all get a blockbuster winter at some point. 

I wills say - I know some of it is just weather superstition...but what Bob Chill says in winter applies sometimes in summer too. We tend to go on "heaters" of severe. A beefy event just to our west could be a harbinger of things to come. Maybe...And nobody come at me for "hoping" for destruction...I'm not. Weather gonna weather. 

The modeling is pretty much unanimous on us being wedged. Even NoVA doesn't look like it escapes the wedge for the most part. Will be keeping an eye on the elevated threat I guess!

Tracking galore to our west tomorrow. Beefy outlook. 

Good amount of thunder and lightning in the wee morning hours. 

I'm still not convinced DC/Baltimore will be in the game. VA seems like a better bet and even then who knows 

75kts of shear might rip apart updrafts as well though. 

8 minutes ago, Eskimo Joe said:

It's hard to be excited beyond a day or 30 hours out from the event. Unless you have some big Bermuda high set up with northwest flow, there are so many variables that can muck up severe weather this time of year.

That being said - I would be happy even with a nice few claps of elevated thunder. The only way I'm okay with mosquito season is thunderstorms  - Not looking forward to sweating my butt off for months on end. 

I'm with @George BM for the most part. We've played this movie before...warm fronts this time of year struggle to get as far north as forecast unless there's some super anomalous push. Heck...even later into April they can struggle...and this would be ultra-early April. Will be interesting to see how this unfolds - but yeah that's a beefy/large 15% area. My guess is that NoVA might get into some surface based action - but I'm not sure I buy north of the Potomac and especially not closer to the M/D line. 

It's nice to have something semi interesting to track, at least. Maybe a sign we won't have a dead early season with weeks of boredom. 

The last few GFS runs appear to be having trouble pushing better dewpoints and such north of the Potomac. It's pretty darn early still - but it's something to track that's not only in the Plains. 

Day 5 15% - woo storms?

The GFS has some decent supercell composite parameters to our west for next Tuesday afternoon - but the timing is bad for us and it fizzles east of the mountains. 

8 hours ago, coolio said:

My observations: It just looked like it was one rickety bridge. Went down easy.

Can't believe they got it on video.

I think I read that the captain of the boat knew that is was out of power and hard to control with plenty of minutes before impact. Why not drop the anchor?

 

From people more knowledgeable than myself - I've heard that it's not as simple as "drop the anchor = stop the boat" - and as a prior poster said - it seems they DID attempt to drop it anyway. 

The optimist in me would hope that even the most adamant of environmental advocates would see the economic impact of this bridge being out of commission for a long duration. Additionally, perhaps they'd see the added fossil fuel burning from trucks having to find longer alternate routes to get to/from the same spots. But optimism only gets you so far these days lol

1 hour ago, Interstate said:

Watching the video was insane... could you imagine being one of the last cars to make it over the bridge.  It looks like mostly construction vehicles on the bridge as it falls in the river.

I wonder if they will build another bridge or make it a tunnel.

I would think they will rebuild a bridge. Right now - that's a major way people go if they can't tolerate the tunnel (other interstate option would be all the way around the western side of 695. Obviously the decision probably won't factor in people's tunnel phobias...but I imagine due to the logistics of tunneling, they will keep it as a bridge when rebuilt. 

A lesser impact - but for folks who do not want to drive through a tunnel - this really sucks for adding travel time to trips through this area. 

38 minutes ago, WxUSAF said:

Think it’s lucky to have happened at the time of the day with the least possible traffic. 

Absolutely this. Horrifying to imagine if this had been during the morning or evening rush hour especially. 

24 minutes ago, Maestrobjwa said:

This is the part of this new...whatever it is I don't get: Why is it that these late freezes have become more prevalent while the winters have been warmer? Although I think @psuhoffman said the Springs aren't getting cooler by the numbers...but why then are we seeing this more? Like...shouldn't a warmer background mean this doesn't happen as much? Make it make sense, lol

Well one thing is you can have a hard freeze or two and then have 20 degree plus departures and the averages will look like the freezes never happened. 

Every few runs of the GFS at least have had a storm system near the fantasy range/end of run that could be a severe producer for our area. Way too far out but has shown up a few times in varying forms. 

We usually flag April as "it's still too early" - but it does come with the benefit of having some really potent systems sometimes before we head into the more summery "doldrum" patterns. It seems we always have a bit of a "butter zone" in spring and fall when CAPE is healthy enough for more than just pencil thin lines of gusty showers - but with higher shear than you'd see in July. 

21 minutes ago, RodneyS said:

Nice shot - especially in foreseeing the large gap between RIC and the other three airports.  

Day-by-day, the clock is ticking in your favor. 

I'm torn on whether to root for a last minute freak snowstorm that makes me lose....or if I should just hope for the win at this point. 

I had not been checking the thread - I thought for sure I would be out after the little snow event. Goes to show you weather is a lot of guesswork...my entry was a total shot in the dark. 

The wind was really rocking last night for a time but it seemed mostly synoptic wind in nature rather than specifically associated with that line of showers. Hopefully before too long we start tracking spring severe! 

That HRRR map shows the localized DC bow very well. #derecho